Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Today.... The up side of homeschooling.

The I get to cut paper and make my children think I can do magic! LOL! My son thinks fringe cut from construction paper is magic! This is the first of our 3 kings. I hope my son will want to make the other 2 himself tomorrow. This isn't a craft I came up with on my own it came from a craft book..... Ice-cream cones or something like that. I will look at the name of it tomorrow if I think about it. My MIL gave me the book it is one she used with her boys.

We are reading about Norman Rockwell for our art studies. It doesn't fit into the time period we are learning about in our other subjects (Late Renaissance/Early Modern 1600-1850) but my son likes to look at Norman Rockwell's work so that is who we are learning about this year. We read how his art always stressed the positive. I got to talk to my son about being positive. We even roll played several times taking turns on how to find the positive if this or that happened. I decided not to go get out our art book to do a drawing class when we finished reading about N.R. I thought instead of reading about "how to draw we could try to copy "My Studio Burns" by Norman Rockwell. We spent time talking about our thought on how he told a story of the fire. You can see what we tried to copy http://tinyurl.com/ydxecg . This is my son's version. It is kind of hard to see but he is 6 and not a great artist yet. LOL!




My son was laughing. It was nice to talk about a fire and not have my son afraid! My son was happy to know that all the family bikes got rescued. I am glad that we went off course and skipped our planned lesson. I know that anyone who knows me in real life is laughing at that line...... I am a person who always gets off track when it comes to our days. We get done all I plan each week but we often take a round about way of getting it done. We use the Classical method for education but I try to never let the perfect unschooling moments skip by. I think that many people who use the Classical method would disagree with me saying that is how we homeschool. I should clarify.... We follow the book The Well Trained Mind. We follow what the book says to teach. I DON'T teach it the way the lessons say. We learn lots of the stuff by jumping, hopping, playing games and such. My children are very active and I guess I am not as structured as some other homeschoolers. We do learn all the stuff in the books (I don't even move ahead on a spelling lesson until my son knows every word) but how we learn the stuff isn't always by writing on paper reading books sitting at the table. This is what is working for us right now. Ask me next month and I might not think the same way I do now. I will try to post the down side of our day tomorrow. I need to get to bed.

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